Thumos is a Greek word that we often translate as "spiritedness" or "passion." It implies a spirit of contention or fight, like having a beer with your buddy and loudly insisting that Dylan was cooler than the Beatles. This is an excuse for spirited posts that follow my more or (often) less disciplined passions.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial about the recount in the Minnesota Senate race. Why do we see, over and over again (Florida Presidential race in 2000, Washington Senate race in 2004, and now in Minnesota), that in close elections where Democrats are in control, they are able to magically find votes just in the nick of time, appearing in the back seats of cars, or Democratic precincts? But, as they say in Casablanca, the establishment is as honest as the day is long. It's only conservatives who engage in fraud by demanding things like photo id.

A liberal acquaintance at work who is very proud of his Master's degree in political science informed me before the election that adding phony votes in an election is morally superior to blocking valid votes. My opinion is that they are both vote fraud. He claimed that when adding a spurious vote, the proportional count is changed by 1/(n+1) (where n is the number of legitimate votes) whereas the proportional count is changed by 1/n when deleting a legitimate vote. Hmmm. Well 1) there's no proportional count in this country, 2) if it's merely about the effect each incremental vote has, then by that logic, stealing Japanese money is not as evil as stealing American money, since the dollar trades at about 95 yen.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Friday, November 07, 2008

President-Elect Obama has made his selection for point man, Chief of Staff -- Rahm Emanuel, the man Fortune describes as a "pit bull." Clinton-era Democratic operative Paul Begala identifies Emanuel as having an aggressive style that is "a cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache."

Regardless how much Senator Obama campaigned for changing politics and the nastiness of tone (and McCain tried to portray himself as above pettiness), politics ain't beanbag. Obama signals that he understands this with his first major staff pick.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Does anyone find it amusing that a church that was famous for stretching the traditional definition of marriage in advocating polygamy is now depicted as nefariously plotting to rigidly define marriage as between a man and a woman and thus control the world (or maybe just California)? Just checking.